Monday, June 25, 2012

Solitude is not the same
as loneliness. Yet it takes on different and subtle
meanings at different times in one’s life. Not everyone needs the same amount
of solitude but most of us crave it at times.

I appear to need solitude more often than
most people I know. For me, it means being alone by choice. It does not
mean the same as being forced into some form of solitary confinement, or by
shunning, or by emotional withdrawal from others.

True solitudeis a choice I make – or one I have to
make.

I crave
solitude when I write.

I can’t work or be open to creativity
unless I am alone. To me, writing is like a dream state, which I can only fall
into in complete aloneness. Enter another human and I am jolted awake and the
dream is shattered. I can’t identify with people who say they wrote a novel in
coffee bars or open libraries, on the bus or in their noisy living room. I think perhaps some have
not been able to overcome the fears of being alone while creating. I can’t work
any other way.

Writing for me, if I'm honest, can also be an escape
from the "noisy" world around me, which is curious because most of the time I’m
writingabout characters under stress –
and they are all talking to each other and to me! I suppose that’s why I have
to work in solitude – to listen to a different form of heartbeat, to work out ideas, past emotions,
and many other sentiments through my writing ...

“Guard well
your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value
will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a
useful life.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Writing is an escape from a world that crowds me. I like being alone in a room. It's almost a form of meditation - an investigation of my own life. It has nothing to do with 'I've got to get out another play.'" Neil Simon

"(The writer) must be alone, uninterrupted, and
slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.” Jessamyn West

"Young Woman Writing" Pierre Bonnard

I crave
solitude to read...

Children today are much more active in
a controlled and organized way than my generation. I wonder sometimes if this generation of
parents realize how important it is for their child to have moments of solitude
in their day. Pleasurable solitude. “Alone time” to lay on the rug and think.
To draw or write quietly in a corner. To read a book with no sound in the house but the
quiet tick of a clock.

“We don’t
need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books,
time, and silence.”Phillip Pullman

"We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence and private: and therefore starved for meditation..." C.S. Lewis

"The New Novel" Winslow Homer

"Woman Reading in a Garden" Henri Labasque

Icrave solitude when I am sad or grieving. I crave solitude when I am tired or in pain.

Solitude can heal. This quote by the great Wordsworth, below, says everything I want to say.

"When from our better selves we have too long been parted by
the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
how gracious, how benign in solitude." William Wordsworth.

"Interior With Sunlight on the Floor" Vilhelm Hammershoi

"Bedroom" Vilhelm Hammershoi

I crave solitude in a crowd....

"All men’s miseries derive
from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone." Blaise Pascal.

“Get
away from the crowd when you can. Keep yourself to yourself, if only for a few
hours daily.” Arthur Brisbane

“There
is music amongst the tree in the garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to
hear it.”Minnie Aumonier

"Rose Garden" Peder Severin Kroyer

﻿

I crave the
freedom of solitude....

At my cabin, canoeing as the mist drifts off the lake and the sun rises, I feel the freedom of true solitude. In the city, under the weight of being starved for time alone, I think about those moments that I've experienced, when I was free, and I yearn for them. But I also find comfort in the memory of them.

"Solitude" Thomas Alexander Harrison

"Angel Wing Mist on Long Pine" Margaret Buffie

"The Canoe" Tom Thomson

"I have never found a companion that was so companionable as
solitude."Henry David Thoreau

"Being solitary is being alone well: being alone
luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of
your own presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an
achievement.”Alice Koller

January 1, 2018 Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and right, R...

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